Ever wanted one of the TWeb owners to just stuff it about Macs? Tired of, err, her putting putting down your beloved brown Zune? Want a TWeb owner to tell the world how marvelous you are?

It's coming! This January 15th, you can make our very own Dizzle your very own helper monkey minion!

Here's how it works, rather than banning our high queen for our annual banning auction, we're forcing her to be nice to Futurists, PC owners, Bill Gates and YOU!
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For details on the giveaway please read the very bottom of the post. Only comments made at the World of Apple publication of this review will be entered for a chance to win a free copy.



Accordance by OakTree Software is one of those massively powerful programs that causes me to think, "Where to begin?" Let's start with introductions. Readers, Accordance 8 is a highly flexible and in-depth program for studying the Bible, commentaries, and related reference tools—including maps—with the ability to conduct extraordinarily complex searches. Its functions meet the needs of the layperson up through the scholar starting with simple translation comparisons all the way to delving into the original languages behind the English translations of the text. Those two sentences, however, do not do this program justice. As I have stated in the past, I am a fairly new Mac convert, joining the cult family in about May 2007 after nearly twenty years of Windows usage since Windows 3.1. Prior to my switch, my Biblical software of choice was the very popular Logos program—particularly the Scholar's Library. Logos did the job, but I did not find it particularly intuitive—and no matter how useful a program may be once mastered, if mastery becomes a chore, I lose interest and motivation. This is why I remain a mediocre Photoshop user. Although there are a ton of resources and conventions and blah, blah, blah to learn the program, I do not care for any software that requires the time of maintaining a second husband to understand. This fact does, however, have to be balanced with the reality that complex programs do have a learning curve, but a good developer will minimize that curve as much as possible and thoroughly equip the user with tools to quickly navigate that painful period. I am very pleased to report that Accordance has done this with true faithfulness to continuity with the Macintosh GUI. While I had recently learned that Logos is being developed for the Macintosh platform, and my (expensive) license is transferable, unless something has greatly changed with their user interface, I do not anticipate ceasing... [Read More]

Jin Roh

The Evidential Problem of Evil

God and the Problem of Definitions

What are the stronger forms of the problem of evil placed before the theist? The logical problem is indeed dead and deservedly laid to rest. The evidential problem is different. Like Voltaire, we recoil at moral evils and ask if it is really likely whether or not God exists at all. Rowe has one specific approach to the argument: he asks, in effect, how is it possible that a supremely powerful and a supremely good God can co-exist with all kinds of evil? His answer is that that it is not likely that God would exist at all. His argument depends on “restricted theism” as opposed to “expanded theism,” advocated by any world religion. I contend that it is inappropriate for Christians to respond to the problem of evil in terms of “restricted theism.” Additionally, expanded Christian theology, specifically that of Jurgen Moltmann, dramatically changes the question of God’s relationship to moral evil (the evil caused by human activity) as well as weakens many of Rowe’s points. For the sake of brevity, I will limit my responses to suffering under moral evil only.
Rowe’s Restricted Theism

Rowe frames his argument with a clear question: “[other] grounds for belief in God aside, do the evils in our world make atheistic belief more reasonable than theistic belief? ” In other words, Rowe wants to (and correctly, I think) deal with the problem of evil by itself, rather than wandering off into peripheral arguments. Given no arguments or issues at all, the probability of God’s existence is 0.5. Given evil, the probability is lower. Certainly, other arguments could shift the odds in favor of theism, but these are arguments placed aside while dealing with evil.

Rowe continues to frame his argument within “restricted theism.” He contrasts this with “expanded theism.” This framework, he explains, is used to avoid confusion of what he means by the term “theism”:
Theism is the view that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good being (God). We can call this view restricted theism. It is restricted in that it does not include any claim that is not entailed by it. So, theism itself does not include any of the following claims: God delivered the ten commandments to Moses, Jesus was the incarnation of God, Muhammad ascended into heaven. These are claims made in specific theistic... [Read More]